Читать книгу Limb from Limb - George Hunter - Страница 33

As Hackel returned to his Mount Clemens office one day during the Grant investigation, he received an unexpected telephone message. “It was Chris Utykanski—Kelly’s husband—asking me to call,” he recollected. The sheriff hadn’t realized that his former high-school classmate now was Stephen Grant’s brother-in-law. “I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh. I never put two and two together,’” he said.

Hackel forced himself to dial the phone. He realized that Chris Utykanski—now Kelly’s fourth husband—was trying to smooth over the family’s strained relationship with the sheriff’s office. The two men talked for an hour and a half, warily circling some of the biggest unanswered questions in the case.

“I tried to be very diplomatic,” Hackel recalled. “I said, ‘There are some things in this case that we have to deal with.’”

When he finally hung up, the sheriff felt a stab of pity for his old pal. “He was a nice guy in high school,” Hackel recalled. “I was pretty good friends with him, and knew him a long time. He was a real nice, easygoing guy. He always kept to himself, never argued with people, and never got into a fight. He was just a low-key guy who didn’t bother anyone. I thought to myself, ‘Boy, he has no idea what is really going on.’”

Meanwhile, Stephen continued giving interviews right and left. He now spoke to reporters with an easy familiarity, obviously pleased to be on a first-name basis with the men and women who were covering his wife’s disappearance. The “Mr. Mom” appeared fascinated by his own notoriety.

“I want people to know me a little better,” he said on Monday. “I think people have the wrong impression.”

He began stopping in at the BP gas station across the street from the sheriff’s office every day, purchasing copies of the Detroit News, the Detroit Free Press, and the Macomb Daily, along with his bottled water and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

“We could see him from our building going into the gas station every day,” Hackel said. “We asked the gas station owner to let us look at his surveillance tape, and he was buying all three newspapers every day. It was obvious he wanted to know what was being said about him.”

Also on Monday, Stephen told reporters that his private investigator, whom he again referred to as a former FBI agent, hadn’t yet turned up any clues.

“I have to keep my faith that she’s out there, and not ready to come home yet,” he said. “It’s really all I can hope for, that she’s OK, but just not in a place mentally to come home.

“And if that’s not the case…well, I’ll deal with that when I have to. I can’t imagine the other road. At the end of that road is two kids whose mother isn’t coming back. And I can’t get my brain around that.”

He said his kids’ lives had been turned inside out over the past two-and-a-half weeks. It was time, he said, that Lindsey and Ian returned to school—first grade for her and private preschool for the boy—after their winter break and a few days they were kept home due to illness.

Stephen admitted his earlier misgivings, that, because of extensive broadcast coverage, the kids’ classmates would question them insensitively about their mother’s fate.

“Kids hear things,” he said. “My concern is, a lot of parents may have the news on while dinner is cooking and they may talk about things. People don’t check what they’re saying.

“I’m afraid that one of the kids in the school is going to walk up to [Lindsey] and say, ‘Your daddy did something horrible to your mommy.’ I understand that people are jumping to conclusions about me. I’ve done the same thing. But being on the other side of it, I’ll think differently from now on.”

Despite his fears, Stephen later said the kids’ first day back in school—Tuesday, February 27—was normal. Meanwhile, he had come up with his own delicate way of relating the matter of their missing mother to the children: he likened it to when the family golden retriever wandered away for a few days about six months earlier.

“I told them, ‘Remember when Bentley was lost for a while? Well, Mommy is lost like that,’” Stephen recalled.